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Sunday, November 26, 2017

Does Committing the Unforgivable Sin Doom Someone?

An atheist
once told me that he had blasphemed against the Holy Spirit. He said it was the
unforgivable sin so conversion would never be an option for him. "'And whoever says a word against the Son of
man will be forgiven; but whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit will not be
forgiven, either in this age or in the age to come" (Matthew 12:22-32).

I wondered
if people could be condemned to hell while still walking the earth? Atheists laugh
it off.For instance, Ron Regan, the unabashed
atheist son of President Ronald Regan, made a commercial for the Freedom from
Religion Foundation a couple of years ago and bragged: “I’m not afraid of
burning in hell.”At an
atheist convention later that year, he announced: “Go ahead and tell us we are
going to hell; we don’t care. We consider it to be imaginary.”

Father
Pacwa

But do
atheists that blaspheme against the Holy Spirit seal their fate? I asked Father Mitch Pacwa, bestselling author
and EWTN radio and TV host who holds a
master’s degree in theology and PhD. in Old Testament, if they are out of reach
of God’s mercy? I was not sure what
happened—maybe the atheist yelled blasphemies at the Holy Spirit. Father Pacwa laughed:
“That is something a teenage snot-nosed punk would do to do be as obnoxious as
he can.”

The sin
against the Holy Spirit is not just saying something blasphemous, Father Pacwa
explained. “But when a person gets to the point of saying, ‘I am so beyond
God’s forgiveness, I can’t ever be forgiven,’ that can become a self-fulfilling
prophecy.”

When Jesus
identified the unforgivable sin in Matthew 12, he had just cast out a demon. The
Pharisees called it an act of Beelzebub. “They identified something good as
evil,” Father Pacwa said. “It’s like when the Nazis killed Jews for Hitler and
said it was a good thing to do. We see that same thing today with people so
rabidly insistent on abortion that they convince others to kill their children
not only as a right, but they call it a good thing.”

But Jesus
said a sin against him could be forgiven. What about atheists who say they have
blasphemed against the Holy Spirit?Didn’t Jesus say that was
unforgiveable?

“They can’t
blaspheme against the Holy Spirit because they don’t even believe in him,”
Father Pacwa said. “It points out the immaturity of their life.” As far as sin and God’s forgiveness, Father
Pacwa said that he is going to work with a person in hope that will repent until
the very end. “I’m going to keep Christian hope,” he said. “But if they
ultimately cannot accept the goodness of God, this is a serious issue.”

Final
Un-repentance

Committing
the unforgivable sin is a scary thought.In the article, ““The Unforgivable Sin,”
Jimmy Akin said: “It isso scary that in the Summa Theologiae
Aquinas devoted a special question with four articles to this form of blasphemy
alone. Today virtually every Christian counseling manual contains a chapter on
the sin to help counselors deal with patients who are terrified that they have
already or might sometime commit this sin.”

St.
Augustine identified the unforgiveable sin as dying in a state of un-repentance,
according to Akin. “Thus the official stand of the Catholic Church's, following
Augustine and a whole host of subsequent moral theologians, is that the
blasphemy against the Holy Spirit is final impenitence,” he said.

Akin also quoted
Pope Saint John Paul II from his Encyclical Letter Dominum et Vivificantem [The
Lord and Giver of Life]. The Pope explained that 'blasphemy' does not properly
consist in offending the Holy Spirit in words but in the refusal to accept the salvation,
which God offers through the Holy Spirit, working through the power of the
Cross.“If Jesus says that blasphemy
against the Holy Spirit cannot be forgiven either in this life or in the next,
it is because this 'non-forgiveness' is linked, as to its cause, to
'non-repentance', in other words to the radical refusal to be converted...” the
Pope explained.

Blasphemy
against the Holy Spirit, he said, is done through rejecting salvation right up
until the last opportunity.

Let us pray
for conversions.“My God, I believe, I
adore, I trust and I love you.I beg
pardon for those who do not believe, do not adore, do not trust and do not love
you.” (Prayer given by an angel to the children at Fatima.)

Alexander House

Patti Maguire Armstrong

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